TV Courses

In what is being claimed as the biggest ever experiment in “edutainment”, a US television company is forming a partnership with a top-ranking Californian university to produce online courses linked to a hit TV show.

This blurring of the digital boundaries between academic study and the entertainment industry will see a course being launched next month based on the post-apocalypse drama series the Walking Dead.

Television shows might have spin-off video games or merchandising, but this drama about surviving disaster and social collapse is now going to have its own university course.

The OU has supplemented courses with material from TV broadcasts for several decades, and has also wrapped factual programming with OU courses. We’ve even commissioned drama pieces that have been woven into OU courses. But something about wrapping Hollywood hype also seemed familiar… and then I remembered Hollywood Science. But it’s not available on iPlayer, unfortunately, and I don’t think it went to DVD either…which makes this all something of a non-post!